Balanced Or Unbalanced Cables For Synth

Just use good quality ts to ts type cables.

Balanced or unbalanced cables for synth.

It s the sequential circuits pro one it doesn t give sound if you put in a balanced jack. If the synth has 1 4 6 3mm jacks for outputs they are very likely unbalanced and using balanced cables will not be of a benefit. The 1st conduction is the audio signal itself and the 2nd is a ground and often a shielding. The roland instruction manual does not mention whether i should use balanced or unbalanced cables.

The main difference comparing balanced vs unbalanced cables is a balanced cable has 1 additional conductor. The advantage of using balanced cables to connect between balanced outputs and balanced inputs is that balanced connections have better noise rejection thanks to a second inverted signal that has equal resistance to ground as the initial signal this inverted or reverse polarity signal is used to cancel noise and to make the signal more robust. The diagram above shows how the cable works. This is especially true if it needs to be used in an environment where there s a lot of lights and other stuff that could cause interference.

Oscar sh 101 ems synthi a moog the source tr 808 tr 909 ms. A balanced audio cable has a ground wire but it also carries two copies of the same incoming audio signal sometimes referred to as a hot positive and cold negative signal. All others are unbalanced outs and ins. Unbalanced cables aren t good for doing long cable runs for this reason in fact you should be using balanced ones if the cable needs to be more than 10 15 meters long.

A typical unbalanced cable like a 1 4 instrument cable has 2 conductors. I have a roland jv1010 sound module and an m audio usb audio quattro that i need to hook up. The structure of a balanced audio cable is similar to an unbalanced cable with one addition. Use unbalanced cables when you have unbalanced instrument outputs.

Some higher end synths may have xlr output jacks which are balanced and balanced cables are what would be used. The balanced cable will have 1 hot 1 cold and a ground shielding. You can with some caveats. The only other synth i m sure of is unbalanced.

Unbalanced cables work great for connecting a guitar to an amp for instance but because they are not very good at suppressing noise from outside interference unbalanced cables should have a maximum length of 15 20 feet 4 6 meters especially when used in noisy environments and with signals that are low level to begin with such as those from keyboards guitars mp3 devices and so on.